For decades, Noam Chomsky has occupied a peculiar and paradoxical position within global political discourse. He is celebrated as a fearless critic of U.S. imperialism, a dissident voice against war, propaganda, and corporate power. Generations of students encountered radical politics for the first time through his lectures and books.
Yet at the very heart of his political worldview lies a contradiction so profound that it cannot be explained away as error, nuance, or misunderstanding. It is a contradiction that reveals the real limits of his politics: a systematic, principled hostility to Marxism-Leninism, to socialist state power, and to every historical attempt by the working class to actually seize and hold power.
This is not accidental. It is the foundation of his political project.
At the core of Noam Chomsky’s worldview lies a deeply bourgeois conception of power. Power, in his analysis, is treated primarily as an expression of centralized authority rather than as a relation between classes struggling over the ownership of the means of production. For Marx, Engels, and later Lenin in State and Revolution, the state is not an abstract concentration of authority but an instrument of class domination arising from irreconcilable class antagonisms. The decisive question is never whether power exists, but which class wields it, in whose interests, and toward what historical end.
The capitalist state and the socialist state thus cannot be reduced to variations of the same phenomenon. One safeguards the reproduction of capital and the exploitation of labor; the other emerges from the revolutionary overthrow of that system and exists precisely to suppress the former ruling class while reorganizing social production. Once this distinction is blurred, imperialist war and socialist construction become morally comparable. The dictatorship of capital and the dictatorship of the proletariat are reduced to different administrative styles of domination. History itself is stripped of material context and transformed into a tribunal of abstract ethics.
This is where Mr Chomsky’s much-celebrated “balance” reveals its reactionary essence. By insisting on an equal moral condemnation of Western imperialism and actually existing socialism, he does not transcend ideology—he reproduces the most basic liberal illusion: that exploitation, war, and repression stem from “power itself,” rather than from specific class rule. In this framework, the question of who holds power, and in whose interests, becomes secondary to the mere fact that power exists.
This is not just mistaken. It is ideological sabotage.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Mr Chomsky’s hostility toward Leninism. Vladimir Lenin is not treated as a revolutionary theorist grappling with unprecedented historical conditions—world war, economic collapse, foreign intervention, and counter-revolution—but as a symbol of authoritarian deviation. The Great October Socialist Revolution, in this telling, did not represent the first successful seizure of power by the working class, but the moment when socialism was supposedly strangled at birth by the party and the state.
Yet this interpretation rests heavily on Chomsky’s long-standing claim that the Soviet Union constituted a form of “state capitalism.” Capitalism is not defined by the presence of a state apparatus or centralized planning; it is defined by private ownership of the means of production, wage labor subordinated to capital accumulation, and production organized for profit. The abolition of capitalist property, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, and the establishment of planned production for social need represented a qualitative break with capitalism, whatever contradictions later emerged. To label this rupture “state capitalism” is to deny the class transformation that occurred in 1917.
This reading requires an extraordinary act of historical erasure. The Bolshevik Revolution did not unfold in a vacuum. It faced armed resistance from dispossessed elites, invasion by fourteen foreign armies, economic collapse, famine, sabotage, and civil war. Under such conditions, the consolidation of proletarian state power was not a theoretical preference but a matter of survival. To dismiss these measures as mere authoritarian impulse is to abandon materialism altogether. Revolutions are not debating societies. They are struggles in which defeated ruling classes attempt restoration by force.
Leninism, therefore, was not an arbitrary centralization of authority but a concrete response to the problem Marx himself left open: how the working class, once victorious, prevents the return of bourgeois rule. The vanguard party, democratic centralism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat were mechanisms forged in struggle to secure the transition from capitalism to socialism in a hostile world system.
The alternative Chomsky offers—“libertarian socialism,” workers’ self-management, anarcho-syndicalist ideals—remains permanently abstract and counterrevolutionary in its essence, disarming the working class precisely at the moment when power must be seized and defended. Historically, such currents reflect the outlook of petty-bourgeois and intellectual strata who recoil both from monopoly capital and from the disciplined, centralized authority required for proletarian rule. They aspire to decentralization without confronting the concentrated force of imperialism.
It never answers the decisive questions: how capitalism is dismantled in practice, how imperialism is repelled when it retaliates, how revolutionary gains are defended against restoration, and how socialist construction is sustained within a world economy still dominated by capital. In practice, this vision functions not as a path to socialism, but as a moral veto against every real attempt to build it.
This is why Chomsky’s anti-Sovietism, however politely phrased, plays such a crucial ideological role. The Soviet Union is not approached as a workers’ state forged in struggle and shaped by material constraints, but primarily as an example of centralized coercion. Its abolition of capitalist property, its decisive role in defeating fascism, its support for anti-colonial movements, and its transformation of a backward economy into an industrial power are subordinated to a broader narrative of authoritarianism. Form eclipses class content.
In this way, Chomsky reproduces the oldest bourgeois inversion: form over content. The question ceases to be whether power serves capital or labor, exploitation or emancipation. Instead, it becomes a matter of structure and moral posture. This is precisely why his critique of socialism is so easily absorbed within liberal discourse. It attacks capitalism rhetorically while disarming the working class politically, teaching generations to distrust the very instruments through which emancipation has historically been achieved.
The result is a politics that is endlessly critical and strategically impotent. Chomsky’s work channels anger against empire into non-revolutionary forms. It allows the imperial core to tolerate dissent that never points toward the seizure of power, toward the necessity of smashing the bourgeois state, toward the dictatorship of the proletariat as a transitional necessity.
This is the reason Mr Chomsky remains “respectable.” Not because he speaks truth to power, but because his critique stops precisely where power becomes vulnerable.
To make this clear is not to deny his intelligence, nor to question his sincerity. It is to recognize his objective political function within the ideological landscape of advanced capitalism. From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, Noam Chomsky represents a dead end: a radicalism without rupture, an anti-imperialism without revolution, a socialism stripped of state power and therefore stripped of historical viability.
The working class does not need moral arbiters who weigh revolutions on abstract scales of purity. It needs theory grounded in the material analysis of class struggle, organization capable of defeating bourgeois resistance, and the willingness to wield power in its own name.
On that decisive terrain—history’s terrain—Noam Chomsky stands not with communism, but against it.
* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of In Defense of Communism.
